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Featured Article - Winter Issue 2009

Sigourney - Super and Sexy at 60!

She may be celebrating her 60th birthday this year, but as the star of the most eagerly awaited blockbuster of the summer, Signourney Weaver shows no signs of slowing down. Piers Chandler looks back at her career so far.

When Sigourney Weaver stars later this year as Dr. Grace Augustine in James Cameron?s $200 million science fiction movie Avatar, she?ll be punching a long awaited hole in the celluloid ceiling for women: parity at last with Eastwood, Ford, and the rest of the male stars who can headline a Hollywood blockbuster even though they?re middle-aged. But for Weaver, setting this landmark will be an anniversary. Thirty years ago she became film?s first female action hero when she played Lieutenant Ellen Ripley, in Alien, Ridley Scott?s sci-fi horror epic.

Cameron?s 1986 sequel, Aliens, made her role more soulful as well as explicitly feminist. The film?s famous poster, featuring a battle-smeared Weaver cradling a huge gun in one arm and a frightened little girl in the other, graced corkboards in women?s offices around the world. Now that her daughter, Charlotte, is off to college, she?s accelerating her work schedule. Last year she showed her range with Prayers for Bobby about a religious woman turned gay rights activist, after her intolerance drives her son to suicide, and HBO?s Gypsy and Me, with Weaver as the exotic dancer Gypsy Rose Lee.

She was born Susan Alexandra Weaver in October, 1949, in New York. Her father, Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, was president of NBC between 1953 ?55, while her mother was Colchester-born actress Elizabeth Inglis, who appeareed in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps as Elizabeth Earl. Susan's life was difficult.

She was uncomfortable in her own body and made all the more so when she compared herself to her beautiful mother. When she reached 13, her parents, unable to communicate with this unusually sullen teenager, sent her into therapy. Matters grew worse when the family moved to San Francisco.

Still painfully shy, Susan asked to be sent to boarding school, having highly romanticised notions of what it would be like. She was shocked when she enrolled at the elite Ethel Walker school in Simsbury, Connecticut. It was horrible. She was known as Freshman Fink and roundly mocked once more for her height - she has stated that she cried for a year, but she did gain a new name. Despising Sue and Susie, she called herself Signourny after one of the characters in The Great Gatsby.

Having a stage name was important to Weaver. Unsure in her ambitions, she'd thought of being a doctor, a lawyer, a marine biologist and (ironically, given one of her most famous roles), an anthropologist working with primates. Her teachers had encouraged her to concentrate on literature, and to practise drama, which she excelled at.

After studying English at Stanford University in San Francisco, Sigourney enrolled at Yale School of Drama, where she was devestated to find that her teachers considered her too tall and thus "uncastable". At drama school she played old women and whores while a new student, a certain Meryl Streep, took all the best parts?

Then came a break. Sigourney auditioned for Woody Allen's Annie Hall. But, though winning the part, she found she had theatre commitments and couldn't do it. Allen wanted her anyway, so she eventually appeared, for six seconds, as his girlfriend.

And then it happened. Sigourney got a call from an agent named Mary Goldberg, an admirer of her work. She said Sigourney should meet up with producer Walter Hill, who was looking for a woman to play the lead in a sci-fi horror film.Sigourney went, but wasn't keen and thought that being chased around by "a blob of yellow jelly" in a trashy slasher movie was beneath her. "I didn't want to play this awful part in this awful movie", she recalled.

Sigourney went to meet the director Ridley Scott anyway. He showed her HR Giger's fantastic design and explained how the Ripley would unusually use intelligence, rather than beauty or big guns, to defeat the alien. She'd be sexy, but not naked. In the end, they even took out a scene where this woman walks into the captain's cabin, unzips and says "I need some relief" - much to Scott's chagrin, as he'd already had developed a wide chair on which the couple could have sex. This woman's sexiness lay in her resourcefulness.

Alien was a massive hit, superbly realised and utterly terrifying. Weaver was now a star and, deeply perturbed by that prospect. Roles were, however, difficult to come by and it wasn?t until she landed a part in Ghostbusters, by pretending to be possessed in the audition, that her star took off again.

The mid 80s saw Sigourney enjoy huge success, starting with Aliens. She hadn?t wanted to return to the Ripley role, but director James Cameron had written a script that appealed. The only thing she didn?t approve of, being active in America's anti-gun lobby, were all the weapons. But she later said that making the movie did at least show her how powerful people feel when heavily armed.

Her next role was Katherine Parker, the moody, hilariously manipulative boss undermined by Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. Then she was Dian Fossey in Gorillas In The Mist, the true-life tale of the activist and anthropologist who fought for animal rights in Africa and was horribly butchered. Weaver would visit Fossey's camp, where all her things were still laid out. Her blood still marked the mattress on which she was murdered. It's a mark of Weaver's tremendous ability that she was Oscar-nominated for both a comedy, then an intensely serious biopic. And following that were further box-office mega-bucks with Ghostbusters 2.

During the 90s she was back as a shaven-headed Ripley in Alien 3, as well the adulterous, cynical, yet sad Janey Carver in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. Then it was back to Alien for a final time with Resurrection, enticed by the presence of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of Delicatessen fame, and a script by Buffy-creator Joss Whedon that had the now-dead Ripley brought back to life as a clone. Now, because of the horrors of Alien 3 in her DNA, Ripley partly was the alien. And there was also the small matter of $12 million for Alien 4 (she only made $30,000 from the first one).

She at last played a mother, opposite Julianne Moore in A Map Of The World, her favourite role, as she considers it closest to herself. "Most of the women I've played," she says "look either constipated or like they've never had an orgasm". She was also excellent as the blonde bombshell Lt Tawny Madison, sending up Star Trek (and herself in Alien,) in the thoroughly amusing Galaxy Quest. More comedy followed, with Company Man, and Heartbreakers where, along with Jennifer Love Hewitt, she took Ray Liotta and many other men for a terrible ride.

More recently Weaver stole the screen in Holes. This was a Disney adaptation of Louis Sachar's classic novel for teens, featuring Camp Green Lake, where bad boys must dig a 5 by 5 by 5 hole every day until they are good. The boys were persecuted by supervisors Jon Voight and Tim Blake Nelson, who were in turn intimidated by Weaver's fabulous Warden Louise Walker, utterly obsessed with finding family treasure buried in the desert. In M. Night Shyamalan's The Village she played a widowed elder in a small Puritan community in 1897, trying to prevent adventurous son Joaquin Phoenix from venturing into the surrounding woods, thought to contain murderous creatures with sharp claws. The Village was a financial hit, maintaining Weaver's profile and allowing her to take on more serious artistic challenges.

A real test was Snow Cake where was cast against type thanks to the persuasive abilities of Galaxy Quest co-star Alan Rickman. Set in Canada, she played a high-functioning autistic whose daughter is killed in a car crash. Rickman was the traumatised driver who stays with Weaver and is inspired to live again by her determination and oblique views. It was funny, tough and tender, with Weaver's thoroughly researched performance being particularly eye-opening.

Sigourney now works when she likes. She goes to the gym, rides horses, practises karate, dances, snorkels and listens to jazz. She has her own production company, Goat Cay, and hopes, perhaps when she's 80, to play Miss Marple, like her hero Margaret Rutherford. She's still a political activist and amongst many other projects, she is on the board of directors of the Lawyers Committee For Human Rights.
And although she has had many varied experiences throughout her career, she never had to contend with the dreaded casting couch. ?I missed that experience.? She smiles ?Maybe my height made me an unlikely person to pounce on, or maybe it was the roles. No one really messes with Ripley!?

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